Curator Talk | Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer on Memento Hikikomori

Join Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, curator of Jon Rafman: Memento Hikikomori, as he guides us through acclaimed Canadian artist Jon Rafman's first major Australian exhibition. Aloisio-Shearer deconstructs Rafman's anthropological approach–scraping the recesses of the internet, mining 4chan greentexts, stripping images from video games, and documenting fringe online communities.

Aloisio-Shearer will contextualise the central works, which include Rafman's ongoing project Nine Eyes (2008–), his feature-length video work Main Stream Media Network (2025–6), and shorter films, Punctured Sky (2021), Still Life (Betamale) (2013), and Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008–11). The talk will consider how Rafman's work contends with the technological mediation of memory, the formation of selfhood and identity, and the unconscious of collective online experience.